


when nobody is listening

by toomanyhometowns



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Death, Don't copy to another site, Fake Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mentions of anti-Semitic violence, References to Catholicism, but the main characters don't know that so:, life after death in the sense that like... you keep having one, more of a Nile By Association fic than anything else, taking care of her family from beyond the frave (fake grave)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28884174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomanyhometowns/pseuds/toomanyhometowns
Summary: Mom and Nile keeping their boys out of trouble, but Dad’s dead, and then Nile enlisted, and now, and now--Mom’s crying just as hard as Tony, now, but he can still hear her say, “She’s still watching out for you, baby, she always will.”--(Written because Nile's got people who love her.)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 53





	when nobody is listening

**Author's Note:**

> fourteen days--i'm still amazed that you are not persisting  
> upon this plane. i say your name when nobody is listening. 
> 
> Title from that section ^ of Long Neck’s [Rosy](https://longnecklass.bandcamp.com/track/rosy-3), which I listened to a lot as I was writing this. Written vaguely for a prompt from a list of [kissing prompts](https://stoppit-keepout.tumblr.com/post/635540718959689728/50-types-of-kisses-writing-prompts): 8. Laying a gentle kiss to the back of the other’s hand. Beta'd by [thought](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought)\--thank you, dear friend!
> 
>  **Heads-up: this is about Nile Freeman’s family dealing with death--hers and her father’s.** Be advised that it is Sad. There's also a scene with mention of a fictional anti-Semitic shooting at a community centre; our POV character isn't in danger, but I wanted to give a warning nonetheless.

Tony has a few memories of Dad’s funeral. They have hard edges, and they shine through tears, crystalline.

Auntie Kai singing Amazing Grace, a red flower on her black dress.

Mom pressing a kiss to his praying hands.

“Come here,” collecting him roughly into her arms with Nile, God, _Nile_.

He’s not going to remember Nile’s funeral. He’s not going to go.

He tells Mom while she’s making a salad to go with dinner on Thursday. Auntie Kai dropped off lasagna and tried to stay, but Mom wasn’t ready to see her, see anyone yet, so it’s just the two of them.

“What do you mean ‘I can’t go,’ you got plans?” The retort comes fast, before she’s looked at him.

Mom’s always on the move--ADD, Nile calls it, though who knows for sure--and it’s only gotten worse since they got the news. Since Tuesday.

 _There’s a lot to do,_ she says when Tony asks if she wants breakfast, and she _can see the TV from where I’m ironing, thanks, baby, you just watch your show_ , and she’s _just going to call Father Willem to make sure everything’s set_ , but she’ll go to bed soon, she promises.

“I can’t,” he says. His grief presses a greedy hand across his throat, strangles the rest of what he wants to say.

Mom knocks over the salad dressing. The plastic thunks when it hits the counter. “Baby,” she says, and she’s there.

Tony pushes his face into her shoulder, and her hands push against the back of his head too, hiding his twisting sobs in her at-home sweater. “I can’t, Mom, she’s gotta come back,” the words lurching out around his crying.

“Shh,” Mom says, and holds him tighter. “I’ve got you.” Her voice trembles so hard that it shakes the bones in Tony’s legs, and they’re folding, Mom slowing his fall, but both going down together.

“Who’s gonna keep me out of trouble now?” Tony doesn’t know if anyone but Mom would be able to understand the words, they’re so clawed-up from tears; he doesn’t know if they really make sense, but it was what they always said. Mom and Nile, keeping their boys out of trouble, but Dad’s dead, and then Nile enlisted, and now, and now--

Mom’s crying just as hard as Tony, now, but he can still hear her say, “She’s still watching out for you, baby, she always will.”

The lasagna doesn’t taste like anything, but at least the lid was on the salad dressing when it fell. Nothing spills.

Tony goes to the funeral and stares so hard at that stupid flag that it shows up, inverted, when he blinks.

\--

Tony’s heart churns in pain that whole first month. It’s somehow even worse than when Dad had died, because at least then, he and Nile had been a team. Mom took care of them, and they’d made sure she didn’t stay up alone. Nile always made their cousins take Tony, too, when they went out for bike rides, always let him tag along and play his music. Tony made sure that when Nile got mad, she didn’t get mad alone.

Mom’s not mad now. The closest she gets is when Tony almost gets written up for being late to too many shifts in a row--she descends upon his manager like an ice storm, and Tony just gets cornered for an awkward apology from his manager the next day.

But mostly she’s _sad_ , and Tony’s sad, and it’s new enough that he doesn’t have a clue what to do.

His friends start coming over to hang out. The Sunday after the funeral, they just show up, and from that point on it seems like someone’s always around. He can’t complain about it. They teach Mom to play Breath of the Wild on Jalen’s Switch, and they pull a jagged laugh from him when Mom tries to catch the giant horse.

When Auntie Kai finds out that Mom’s letting Tony’s friends come over and play video games, she practically moves in. “Let me take care of you,” Tony overhears her telling Mom one night, and the echo of Nile hits him so hard that he has to sit down right there in the hall.

Auntie Kai’s able to be around all the time because work is giving her some paid time off--something about a bunch of vacation days she needed to spend, though she also told Mom the days definitely hadn’t been there in December when she’d wanted time for Christmas. Tony’s dimly grateful for whatever glitch had hidden the vacation from her then, because it means now she’s here, and she can help.

They spend a lot of time in the kitchen, even though food still doesn’t taste right. Tony sleeps in Nile’s room sometimes and tries to tell himself she’s still there looking over him, like Dad.

It doesn’t get easier that Nile’s gone, but it gets easier for Tony to still be around.

\--

He gets into U Chicago. He gets into a few other schools, too, and has a couple rejections he didn’t care to read, but he _gets into U Chicago_. Take _that_ , second grade teacher who held him back! In your face, freshman English teacher who failed a perfectly good essay about Percy Jackson!

“You deserve it, you worked so _hard_ ,” Mom says. He picks her up off her feet in a hug, and she laughs, loud.

“Thanks for _making_ me work,” he says. “And thanks for fixing my application.”

“Oh, for--” She’s grinning as she slaps at his arm, and he puts her down. “How many times do I have to tell you, I didn’t do that!”

Tony rolls his eyes, but he’s sure he’s still grinning like a fool. “Sure, Mom.”

“You need to give yourself credit, you earned every bit of this.”

Sure he did, but he has some proof that Mom went and fixed things even after she'd said his submission looked good--when he’d checked the system the day after he’d uploaded his application, the PDF didn’t look quite the same as the one he had on his computer. Tony's smart, but he knows he’s never totally perfected the right ‘their/there/they’re/whatever,’ no matter how many times Nile had tried to explain it.

Mom probably doesn’t want to bring down the moment with reminders of what they’ve lost, so he doesn’t bust her for it just yet.

She’s his mom, though, so she sees the bite in his smile even without him saying anything. “They’re so proud of you,” she says, and gives him another hug. “I just know it.”

\--

The anniversary of Dad's death hits harder without Nile around.

Mom's distracting herself with some stress about the building where they live--the owner's selling it, and it looks like they're gonna be bought by "some godawful soulless corporation that's gonna raze the whole block to the ground and build skyscrapers full of million-dollar condos" according to Mom, unless she writes a convincing enough plea to the Zoning Ordinance Administration. Tony loses track of the number of times he asks her a question about how she's doing, and gets an answer about how her campaign is going instead.

Without telling Mom so much, Tony figures that if it happens, it happens. He doesn't have the energy to throw himself at the city or join tenant associations or anything. His only concession to the impending move is asking to start taking overtime, because there's no way they'll find a place as affordable as their current home. He's been working for FedEx since he graduated high school, and while he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life working in a distribution warehouse, he's made some friends and the pay's decent.

If he keeps his hands busy enough, it keeps his head from getting caught up in memories and math. (He's seen three times more anniversaries of Dad's death than Dad had seen of Tony's birthdays. If he lives as long as Grandpa did, Tony will see twice as many anniversaries of Nile's -- no.)

He doesn't ask for time off on the anniversary itself, just works as scheduled and sits on the roof to eat during his break. He says a rosary, counting off cold fingers instead of the beads, and stretches before he goes back down to finish his shift.

"They sold today," Mom tells him when he gets home. "Take your shoes off before you come in here, I just cleaned."

Tony complies and finds her in the living room where she's beaming like he's never seen on this day before. "So it's not condo guys?"

"No," she crows. She claps her hands once and pumps her fist in victory.

"Alright!" Tony grins, and the smile feels funny on his face, but right.

"It'll be some little property management thing I'd never heard of." She waves him over and he bends down so she can kiss his cheek. "Kinda Greek-sounding name."

"They're not gonna tear it down?"

"Nope," Mom says triumphantly. "They say they wanna make it a co-op. C'mere, we're gonna celebrate. I made that dip you like."

The mood that night swings wildly between Mom's victory and their shared grief. Usually they take out the old photo albums and Mom and Nile share stories about Dad that Tony was too young to remember, but this year the albums stay on the shelf.

Tony goes to bed early. Mom appears in his door a few minutes after he settles down, and sits on the edge of his bed for a few minutes, petting his hair.

"Love you, baby," Mom says when her hand stills.

"You too, Mom," and she presses a kiss on the crown of his head.

Even though the room's quiet, it's hard to hear Mom say, "I wasn't ready to move away from our home yet."

\--

Starting college at 20 shouldn't feel so different to starting it at 18, but Tony still has a hard time the first couple weeks. Everyone seems so young in a way that has a bit to do with the year he'd worked after high school, but probably has more to do with… Well, Tony's had a hard year.

In a weird twist, one of Nile’s old friends is the TA for Tony’s object-oriented programming class. He hadn’t recognised her name on the syllabus, but when she walks into the tutorial saying, “Okay, students of MPCS 51410-B, please correct your syllabi because you are now in _Sandra’s_ section,” her face and voice shove him abruptly back in time.

He’s eight and he’s threatening to tell on her and Nile for cutting gum out of Nile’s hair, he’s ten and he’s trying to convince Nile to let him watch horror movies with them, he’s twelve and getting roped into taking pictures of her and Nile posing in Halloween costumes.

She looks shaken when she sees him, then shakes it off.

He doesn’t know how to bring it up, but he goes to her office hours in the second week of class anyway. Before he goes in, he doesn’t really want to talk about Nile. He doesn’t want to cry, he doesn’t want to have to lie that it’s okay, he doesn’t want to listen while someone talks about Nile the way people talk about Dad. Like she’s gone. Like she’s over.

He goes in anyway.

“Tony,” Sandra says, and she’s not crying yet at least. “I’m so sorry.”

It ends up not being too bad. They talk about Java for a bit, because there’s an assignment coming up next week, and Sandra mentions she just got a grant to work on something about databases that Tony doesn’t totally follow yet (but he will).

He comes back a few more times. It eventually ends up being nice to trade stories back and forth with someone who knew Nile, and Nile’s drive, her sharp wit, her big heart. Tony learns again that Sandra and Nile had met on the first day of kindergarten, and that Nile had _screamed_ when the teacher had tried to partner them up with different people in the second week of school.

“She always said she just knew, with me,” Sandra says like a badge of honour.

“She was like that,” Tony says. It settles, a small betrayal, in his ribs. _She’s still like that_ , he silently, irrationally papers over.

\--

Over summer, Tony starts waiting tables just off the edge of Boystown. Jalen tells him he's handsome enough to get great tips, and he's secure enough in his heterosexuality to be flattered by that. As a plus, the restaurant's pretty close to the lake, so sometimes he goes to the neighbourhood early just to walk around the dog beach and smile at strangers' pets.

Jalen turns out to be right--within a few weeks, Tony's already collected at least a dozen numbers, and politely turned down several offers of joining a couple for a night of fun.

At first, he thinks that's what Joey and "you can call him Nico" are after, with Joey's warm eyes and Nico's sharp stare clearly sizing him up. They show up on a Monday morning, take a table by the window, and linger over the menu, talking in what Adriana describes as "dunno, weird Italian?" when Tony asks. It's pretty dead, so he leaves them to their own devices until they close their menus.

"Looks like you've decided," he says.

"We have," Nico says. He looks like he wants to say something else, too, but Joey fills in their order instead.

Tony rattles through the options for the breakfast platter with Joey on autopilot. Something about Nico is distracting--he's got a very intense stare, whether he's monitoring something outside, out of Tony's eyeline, or whether he's searching Tony's face for… whatever it is he's looking for.

"How are you, Tony?"

"Can't complain," he says with a smile. "Let me just drop these off at the kitchen for you."

They become regulars for a week or so, and Tony starts making sure the table by the window with the view is always free for them. They're obviously head-over-heels for each other: Nico affectionately taps at the brim of Joey's baseball cap, and Joey ducks his head away from the window with a laugh; Joey runs his thumbnail over his lip as he winks at Nico in a way that makes Tony feel like a voyeur for witnessing. They automatically move parts of their order into the space between their two plates, silent agreement that this fruit cup or that smoothie is mutual property.

They manage to turn off the flirting long enough to chat with Tony when he stops by to get their orders. On Thursday he tells them they remind him of his parents, whenever Dad wasn't posted anywhere, and they laugh, invite him to have a seat at the table next to them and talk for a bit. It's quiet and the front-of-house manager that day is chill, so Tony takes them up on the offer

He surprises himself with how much he enjoys the conversation. They're in town for work, but they don't offer details--instead they trade stories of times they've worked in customer service, offer advice that reminds Tony of his uncles in some obscure way. They're calm, settled, kind.

The week ends eventfully.

Tony's working the day there's a shooting at the community centre across the street. He's actually the first member of the staff to realise what's happening, a combination of his section being near the windows and him having grown up on the south side meaning he's got enough information and experience to put it together.

There's silence after the first shot, then screaming, and Tony's already urging people onto their feet and back towards the kitchen. "Okay everybody, move in, you can come back to your food later," he says, and shit, Joey had stepped outside a few minutes ago for a cigarette, is Nico going to--

But Nico's right behind him, coolly peering over his shoulder out the window and peeling customers away from their meals.

When everyone's crowded into the hall to the bathroom, Tony ends up beside Nico, closest to the door back out to the restaurant.

"Did you want to text your husband?" he asks, as quietly as he can.

Nico shakes his head. "He'll be alright." Tony's palms are sweating and his heart hammering, but Nico's intensity is strangely calming. "Right now, my job is to take care of us."

Nico's vigilance makes Tony feel like he can take a minute to get his phone out and scroll through Twitter. Someone uploads blurry cell phone footage which immediately gets flagged as fake--Tony looks for anyone he knows in it, but the closest he gets is a flash of braids under a hoodie that reminds him painfully of Nile. His heart clenches, sorrow and adrenaline neck-and-neck in his veins, and he starts a text to Mom before she can start to worry.

"There's nothing to fear," Nico says when Tony catches him watching him. "You will be safe here."

It's over almost as soon as it'd started. After the initial gunshots and mad rush to the back hallway, they're only back there a few minutes before they hear sirens, cops coming in the front door to announce an all-clear. With a squeeze to Tony's arm, Nico ducks back out front before Tony can tell him to stop. He loses him in the bustle. 

Everyone in his work group chat spends the day sharing articles back and forth. Unidentified white males taking semi-automatic weapons to a Jewish community centre ("unknown political affiliation," fuck right off), confusion--someone says the Neo-Nazi fucks killed each other by accident? It's still unclear, but there's consensus that the only people who'd been hurt had been the skinheads who'd started it all. The little note of worry Tony'd been carrying for Joey and Nico fades away--he'd've felt awful if they'd been hurt.

They're not there when the restaurant opens the next week; Tony never gets to thank Nico for keeping his cool.

\--

“You coming today?” Mom asks. She’s already dressed for church, but she’s sitting half-on the chair in front of the computer, distractedly typing something into a comment box on Facebook. “I’m leaving in a minute, just have to do...” She trails off, her typing picking up tempo.

Tony doesn’t bother responding out loud, just ducks back to his room to change his shirt and goes to wait by the door for Mom to finish up.

“Okay, okay, we’re gonna be late,” she says, grabbing her purse and rifling through it for her keys. “Is your sister already in the car?”

The words pounce on them both. Stillness, then explosive motion as Mom flinches, as she drops her purse and her little tin of breath mints bursts and scatters.

“Mom,” Tony says, and she’s already on her knees, gathering up her things. His knees thud on the floor, following to help.

“I’m sorry, it’s just--”

“I know,” he says, and he repeats it because Mom wasn’t looking the first time. “Mom, _I know_.”

“I didn’t forget,” Mom says, hands finally still, eyes meeting Tony’s. “I could never.”

“But it’s like she’s still here, right?” Mom blurs and glows in the tears filling Tony’s vision. “You feel it, too.”

That’s what tips Mom over into crying, too.

They’re late for church, but they still go.

 _Peace be with you_ , murmuring around them, and Mom holds his face in her hands and makes him bend so she can kiss him on the forehead, like she always does.

Communion, and prayer. _Please protect Mom, and bless the whole family, and let me get through finals okay._ Tony prays the way he’s been praying for almost a year now: to God, and to Nile.

Mom’s kneeling beside him, her shoulder against his, and he crosses himself when his thoughts have smoothed out. Mom catches his hand in a tight grip as he’s lowering it; they hold on to each other.


End file.
